This is definitely one of the biggest hurdles to running a relay for just about any purpose, not just communities.
What do you think about the possibility of using something like Pear runtime for connecting to a community relay?
I had an idea this weekend for how to make running community or personal relays easier for non-technical people by piggy-backing on commodity relays to avoid dealing with DNS/incoming connections. This would allow people to simply run a "relay" on a computer they own, but have it publicly accessible.
The way this works is via a DVM-like flow, where the user NIP 59 wraps a message to the relay's pubkey, sends it to a public relay where the target relay is listening, and waits for a similarly wrapped response back.
I call these "kelays", which is a terrible name, but the best I could come up with within 8 seconds. You can see my proof of concept implementation at https://github.com/coracle-social/kelay. The go program allows proxying any relay, and the `example.sh` uses `nak` to demonstrate the flow.
People could address these using something like `kelay://
What do you think? This could obviously be abused in any number of ways, and I still have to figure out how I can make NIPs 42 and 98 work. And maybe some other p2p technology would be more suitable for hole punching. But this is the kind of left-of-bell curve solution that made nostr famous, so I'm reasonably optimistic about it.
Discussion
Could work, I just don't know much about pear. In either case, it's a new transport protocol, so in theory they'd be functionally equivalent
I like that yours is using a Nostr relay to establish the connection. Once the connection is established, everything else is just straight from client to community relay, right?